Every Which Way But Loose (1978) on Netflix
Philo Beddoe drives a truck in the San Fernando Valley and earns money in bare-knuckle fights. His housemate is Clyde, an orangutan. When singer Lynn Halsey-Taylor vanishes, he heads for Denver.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.3/1031,591 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes41%
Trailer
Plot summary
Philo Beddoe drives a truck in the San Fernando Valley, where he also makes money as a bare-knuckle fighter and is often compared to a legendary brawler named Tank Murdock. He lives in a small house with an orangutan named Clyde, behind the home of his best friend, Orville Boggs, and Orville's mother. One night at the Palomino Club he meets Lynn Halsey-Taylor, an aspiring country singer, and falls for her. She disappears from the trailer park with her camper, so Philo sets off for her home in Denver. Orville and Clyde go with him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Every Which Way But Loose (1978)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Clyde the orangutan was played by an animal actor named Manis; Eastwood said Manis was one of the most natural performers he ever worked with, but the crew had to capture his scenes on the first take because his attention span ran out quickly.
- Music supervisor Snuff Garrett rang songwriter Steve Dorff asking for a song called “Every Which Way But Loose”, telling him only that Clint Eastwood plays a guy who likes to beat people up and travels around with an orangutan; Dorff and his friend Milton Brown wrote it by phone in about 30 minutes.
- The film opened in 1,275 theaters and grossed $10,272,294 in its first week, beating Clint Eastwood's previous best opener The Enforcer, and went on to take $104.3 million in the United States and Canada as the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1978.
- The script by Jeremy Joe Kronsberg had been rejected by many other Hollywood production companies, and most of Clint Eastwood's production team and his agents reportedly thought the project was ill-advised, but his associate Bob Hoyt convinced Warner Bros. to buy the story.
- Two songs from the soundtrack, the Eddie Rabbitt title track and Mel Tillis's 'Coca-Cola Cowboy,' hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart in 1979, alongside Charlie Rich's 'Behind Closed Doors,' which had already topped that chart back in 1973.
- Despite the doubts, the film and its 1980 sequel Any Which Way You Can became two of Eastwood's highest-grossing films, and adjusted for inflation this one still ranks among the 250 highest-grossing films ever made.
